Maryam Zandi

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maryam Zandi, born in 1946 in Gorgan, Iran, is an Iranian documentary photographer and author. She studied law and political sciences at the University of Tehran and began photography in 1970, winning a national prize early in her career. In 1972 she joined National Iranian Radio and Television as a photographer and later worked as the public relations photographer for TV and Tamasha magazine, staying with National Television for about twelve years. She photographed the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and began her major project Chehreh-ha: Portraits in 1981, which remained unfinished for many years due to the Iran–Iraq War and a 1986–1989 trip to France.

Her first book, Turkmen & Sahra: Turkmen & Desert, was published in 1982, studying the Turkmen people of Iran. After returning to Iran in 1989, she resumed Chehreh-ha, which became a long-running archive of famous Iranians in literature, visual arts, cinema, theatre, architecture, music, and politics. Zandi has published more than ten photography books. Since 2000, she has collaborated with designer Ebrahim Haghighi to produce numerous artistic calendars featuring Iranian photography. In 2005 she helped found the National Iranian Photographers’ Society (NIPS) and was elected its first chairman in 2009; she resigned in 2013. In 2010 she declined a top art medal in protest of limits on photographers’ freedom. She also received the Sheed Award in 2010 and 2014 for her work on the 1979 Revolution. She has designed glass art and held exhibitions of it.